Our Week in the Forest

Fantastic minibeasts and where to find them! :-)

This week we have been spoilt with glorious sunshine! With such great weather we have been making our walk in's slightly longer exploring all the beautiful trees in the Palace grounds, before reaching base camp for our hello song and snack. The children have been fantastic at self-regulating their water intake, showing independence when making sure to have water breaks throughout their day. We have group water breaks as well, but as a whole the children have been great at making sure they don’t over heat in this warm weather.

We have also had some great activities this week. Some of the children have been making snakes by threading pieces of hollowed out elder onto string. The children have displayed strong fine motor skills which has most likely been down to all the knot tying we do when making tepee's or putting up tarp shelters as a group. Talking of construction, on Wednesday the children were presented with wood, string and rope with the opportunity to make whatever they wished. Collectively amongst the children it was decided that they would make a “robotic electric car with a caravan”. The car was a self-driving car, which followed instructions through a microphone and took us to Sweden and Africa. The children’s’ imagination and creativity never fails to impress us and this was a fantastic activity that was completely child led, with the teacher taking the role of mechanic whenever the children had a flat tyre.

As well as playing lots of games in the sun and constructing the next vehicles of the future, the children have also been discovering minibeasts that aren’t that mini! Over the last few weeks the children have spotted around 6 endangered male stag beetles. This Wednesday we found one on our playing field next to base camp and we were able to study how it moved and document our findings with the children using cameras. They were fascinated by this great beetle and having studied it the children continued their search around our forest. The children are always excited to learn about our natural surroundings, and by providing them the tools necessary (such as magnifying glasses, cameras and voice recorders) they are able to be true explorers documenting their fantastic discoveries!

We look forward to carrying on our adventures next week and hope all our lovely families are able to get out and explore the outdoors this weekend in the glorious weather.

As our friendships develop, as does the group play that the children take part in. We have seen our children engage with brilliant imaginative play. An example of this was on Thursday when the children were acting out the story of The Three Little Pigs and the Big Bad Wolf. The children had divided into two groups, the pigs and the wolves. Mud mountain had become the fortress of the pigs and our wolves had to find a way to get in. As our pigs developed advance protective barriers and multi lock windows and doors, the wolves had to use all their trickery and hatch cunning plans to try fool the pigs. The wolves were superbly imaginative, pretending to dress up as pigs/red riding hood and even grannies. The play lasted a whole afternoon and throughout it the children were encouraging each other to join in, talking about how to protect their house or fool the pigs and even directing how their teachers needed to act or perform to take part in the story.

Our week in the forest has been one full of laughter and fun with all of our friends and we look forward to these friendships growing even stronger in the future with empathy at the centre of everything we do.

Reminders

In the warmer weatherThe sunshine is predicted to carry on into early next week with the temperatures rising even higher. With that in mind, we would like to remind our parents to apply sun screen before joining us in the forest, to make sure the children have water bottles full of water and for children to come in with sun hats to protect them in the sunshine.

Our recommended Summer Kit List can be found here.

Dates for the diary Our term dates can be found here.

Save the dateDon't forget to save the date for our Summer Picnic on Friday 18th August from 5pm at Wimbledon. More details to follow on this exciting event.